There Were No Winners in the Farmworker Strike
There were no winners in the farmworker strike. Tractor driver Michael Daniels lost his life to a police bullet. Seasonal worker Bongile Ndleni lost his life to a private-security bullet. Farmer Tienie Crous, 81, almost lost his life when strikers accosted him (his hearing aid had to be cut out of his skull). Towns were ransacked and property destroyed. Sheds and bulk bins and tractors and vineyards went up in flames.
Farmers are jittery and angry and scared. Many are talking of selling their farms and emigrating. Farmworkers in permanent employ are likewise jittery and angry and scared. They don't have the option, however, of packing up their lives. They have to ride out this storm and see whether they still have jobs come April.
The strikers who resorted to violent protest were losers too. They took their share of rubber bullets, and no doubt a good dose of police brutality. They also had to face the wrath of workers they'd intimidated into staying at home. The first day of protest might have been kind of fun, but after four days without pay people were desperate.
The politicians were clear losers. Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape, was the best of a bad bunch, but only because she didn't blatantly put her foot in it. She dithered, failing to show decisive leadership, most likely because she didn't wish to antagonise either the farmers or the coloured workers, both traditional supporters of the DA. Her party's statements to the press, however, were indistinguishable from those of farmer organisations such as Agri SA. Zille's opposite number, Marius Fransman, provincial leader of the ANC, made an aggressive start, telling farmers ‘julle gaan kak', before wisely taking a back seat.
Tina Joemat-Pettersson, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, put on a disastrous show. Addressing a large crowd of strikers in De Doorns, she congratulated them on their ‘victory'. None of them, she said, would face disciplinary action or criminal charges. It's difficult to say which of these two statements is more bizarre: a Minister of Agriculture congratulating farmworkers for an illegal strike in which vineyards were torched; or a minister from a non-judicial portfolio promising immunity from prosecution to people who have taken part in an orgy of criminality, including barricaded a national road and stoning passing vehicles. To cap off her performance, the minister announced that the sectoral determination for agriculture (the minimum wage) would be reviewed within two weeks - something that wasn't constitutionally possible. Joemat-Pettersson has since become embroiled in a scandalous decision to further deplete the country's ailing fish stocks. And the Public Protector has accused her of unlawful use of state funds.
But perhaps I'm being too hard on Joemat-Pettersson. She's so ineffectual and bungling it's difficult to blame her. She doesn't seem capable of something as demanding of the intellect as malicious intent. Whereas the villain of the piece is the very embodiment of malicious intent: Cosatu's razor-sharp provincial secretary, Tony Ehrenreich.
Before discussing Ehrenreich's role, however, I need to say a few things about the genesis of the strike. Many aspects of the strike are more complex than they would appear, and issues differ from region to region. Even a simple word like ‘strikers', for instance, is not at all straightforward. ‘Farmworkers' and ‘strikers' and ‘protesters' are distinct groupings of people. These groupings overlap somewhat in De Doorns, but less so in Ceres.
When the strike started in De Doorns in early November, the protesters - that is, the people burning tyres and stoning vehicles - were farmworkers. There's some disagreement as to whether these protesters were seasonal workers from Lesotho whose work permits hadn't been renewed or whether they were a broader coalition. Either way, they were disgruntled seasonal workers who then intimidated the valley's permanent workers into joining them. A friend of mine farms in De Doorns. His permanent workers received threatening text messages: ‘We're coming to get you,' read these messages (in Afrikaans), ‘we know which vineyard you're in.' My friend spent the day transporting terrified workers from one corner of his farm to another. He then told them to stay home.
The seasonal workers in De Doorns probably had just cause to strike. Over the past decade or two, growers of table grapes in the Hex River Valley have seen their margins shrink dramatically (thirty per cent of farms in the Hex have changed hands in the past five years). As a result, many farmers have taken on a greater proportion of seasonal labour and have paid them close to the statutory minimum. While it's difficult to condone this course of action - R69 is an appalling wage - it's easy enough to understand it.
In Wolseley and Ceres (two regions of which I can speak with some authority: my brother farms in Wolseley, I farm in Ceres) the situation is very different. Farmers grow apples, pears and plums. Despite a number of challenges, margins are healthier. This reflects in the wages. The farms around me all pay between R85 and R90 a day to their lowest-paid workers. In addition, workers are paid a piecework rate per tree pruned or per bag picked. This averages out, over the course of a year, at around R25 a day. In addition, workers receive an annual bonus, free transport, subsidised visits to the doctor, free créche facilities and paid school fees. Workers who live on the farm pay no rent and their electricity is subsidised. If one attaches a value to these benefits, then the average live-on worker receives R140 a day, and the average live-off worker R120. Workers who choose to exert themselves earn significantly more. As do skilled workers such as team leaders, administrative staff and tractor drivers.
Similar rates of pay would apply to many farms in Ceres and Wolseley, and elsewhere in the Boland too. It's not a whole lot of money, but with labour accounting for forty per cent of costs, it's as much as a well-run fruit farm can reasonably afford to pay. And given the national context, where sixty per cent of households earn less than this, it's certainly not a rate of pay that lends itself to violent protest. This is where the politics comes in.
The coordination and efficiency with which the strike spread from De Doorns to fifteen other Boland towns on a single day speaks of careful planning and significant mobilisation of personnel and resources. There is little doubt that the ANC in the Western Cape and its alliance partner Cosatu were behind this roll-out. A pamphlet on ANC letterhead was distributed in Villiersdorp, and there were reports, throughout the Boland, of intimidation by Cosatu members (despite the fact that there are very few unionised farms in the Boland). This would explain the strangers disembarking at Wolseley train station, and the buses arriving in Nduli, the township outside Ceres, in the middle of the night. I'm no fan of the DA's reactionary politics, but their spokesperson for agriculture, Pieter van Dalen, was probably close to the truth when he characterised the strike as ‘simply the latest instalment in the African National Congress's campaign to make the Western Cape ungovernable'.
Not a single worker on my farm wanted to strike. Those who live in Nduli were informed that their families and their houses would be at risk if they went off to work. Those who live on the farm received threatening telephone calls and text messages. Whether these threats would have been carried out is moot. The workers were terrified and retired to their homes.
Tony Ehrenreich turned fifty last year. It is a dangerous age for a man. An age at which he might be tempted to look back over his life and ask what he's achieved so far, and what he might yet achieve. In Ehrenreich's case, he ran for mayor of Cape Town in 2011 and was badly beaten by Patricia de Lille. He is clearly an ambitious man, not content with his job as provincial secretary of Cosatu, an organisation he joined over twenty years ago.
Ehrenreich's role in the strike has been nothing short of despicable. To announce that ‘Marikana is coming to the farms in the Western Cape' is not only extremely irresponsible, it is also callously opportunistic. When Ehrenreich invoked Marikana for a second time - on a poster that featured his photograph above the gleeful exclamation ‘FEEL IT!!! Western Cape Marikana is here!!!' - the Democratic Alliance laid a charge of incitement to violence. Ehrenreich is also on record as saying: ‘The strike ... could see a reversal to the low-level civil war we all witnessed on farms a few weeks ago.'
The only conclusion one can draw from these inflammatory utterances is that Ehrenreich wanted to see the Western Cape burn. Why? To please his political bosses, most likely. And also, no doubt, to raise the profile of Tony Enrenreich Inc., mayoral candidate and champion of the poor. Only, he's far from a champion of the poor. One of the sad ironies of the strike was that the majority of protesters - in Ceres and Wolseley, at any rate - were either unemployed or occasionally employed. Had they achieved their goal of getting the minimum wage increased to R150 a day, they would have locked themselves out of a job for a long time to come. Ehrenreich's political pawns were the very people who stood to lose the most had his strike achieved its stated goal.
Ehrenreich, lest it appear to the contrary, was also a loser in the strike. He's been the subject of more hate mail than I've ever seen in the blogosphere; he raised workers' hopes only to disappoint them; and, judging by Cosatu's limp showing in the second round of the strike, he was hauled over the coals by the ANC high command. The North West Marikana dealt the economy such a crippling blow, the government had little appetite, it would appear, for a Western Cape instalment.
Despite the fact that there were no winners, the strike wasn't all bad. The incitement and the intimidation and the violence and the destruction were obviously bad. The cynical deployment of thousands of poor people to further the personal ambitions of a handful of politicians was equally bad. But the principle of a widespread strike in the agricultural sector has merit. For too long now labour relations have been the elephant in the corner of the orchard, so to speak. The strike gave us a chance to talk, to let off some steam, and - hopefully - to take action. Personally, it has long bothered me that workers living on my farm get free housing, while those living off the farm don't; the strike has prompted me to look into ways of subsidising off-farm living. Come April, I would like to see the minimum wage for farmworkers increased substantially. It's certainly not the solution to rural woes, but exploitative farmers should feel the heat. Most of them can afford to pay more. Those who can't need to face up to the fact that they're subsidising the inefficiency of their operations with cheap labour.
Leaving aside the question of who lit the match, there's no denying that the strike spread like wildfire. There is deep dissatisfaction in rural areas, and farmers would do well to take heed of it. But government should take heed too. This dissatisfaction, I would argue, has more to do with poverty, unemployment and the lack of any prospects for a better life than it has to do with labour relations on farms. This strike wasn't all strike, it was part social unrest.
‘If Minister Joemat-Pettersson and Mr Ehrenreich really want to benefit farmworkers,' writes economist Johan Fourie on his blog, ‘they should rather worry about another legacy of Apartheid - the poor performance of rural schools, especially in those provinces where many of the migrants come from - and less about government policies to change the minimum wage.' Unfortunately, however, as Fourie points out, adjusting the minimum wage is easier to do, and it's a more popular sell.
William Dicey is a farmer and a writer.
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